Richard Neal Quotes
The alternative minimum tax was designed to prevent the very wealthiest Americans from overusing certain tax benefits to avoid most of their tax burden.
United States. Congress. Congressional Record. Government Printing Office, 5 May 2004, p. H2596.
As a result of years of lobbying many vested interests were getting tax exemptions for their activities. Some of the richest corporations and people paid little or no taxes. This was like the old European monarchies where the dukes and nobles got tax exemptions from the king and the middle class and poor people paid a much larger percentage of their income and wealth than did the nobility. Fairness in taxation is very difficult in practice. See {633629}
The nation rejected the flat tax that was favored by conservatives in the 1930s. However, in the Republican Presidential Primary Campaign of 2000, candidate Steve Forbes made the flat tax a centerpoint of his campaign. He lost badly, but the idea caught on amongst some conservative Republicans, and has had some support since.
His minimum tax proposal was for the income over $10 million was 35%. For income between $1 million and $10 million, it was 30%. At the time, he found that his secretary, everyone who worked in his office, and the waiter who served him lunch, all paid a higher income tax rate than he did. President Obama, in a great struggle with the Republicans who fought to retain the lower tax rates for the wealthy with deductions, was able to terminate the Bush tax cuts for the very rich.
He was one of the richest men in America, who thought that the tax burden on the very wealthy was too low given the needs of the nation and the ability of the wealty to pay..
Richard Edmund Neal is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Massachusetts's 1st congressional district since 1989. The district, numbered as the 2nd district from 1989 to 2013, includes Springfield, West Springfield, Pittsfield, Holyoke, Agawam, Chicopee and Westfield, and is much more rural than the rest of the state. A member of the Democratic Party, Neal has been the dean of Massachusetts's delegation to the United States House of Representatives since 2013, and he is also the dean of the New England House delegations.
